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The essence of a nation

Shomei Tomatsu's images portray a haunting postwar Japan
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By Bethany Shaffer
For The Prague Post
January 31st, 2007 issue

Photo by Shomei Tomatsu
An unapologetic sex worker personifies the unswerving devotion to work.
Shomei Tomatsu was only 15 years old and didn’t own a camera when the atomic bombs fell on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, ending World War II. However, those events and the occupation that followed stamped every chapter of this artist’s lifelong masterpiece, currently on display at Galerie Rudolfinum.
Born in 1930 in Nagoya, Tomatsu acquired a camera five years after the bombings and two years before the end of the U.S. occupation of Japan. One might suppose, then, that the young photographer had missed out on capturing the atomic aftermath and effects of war on his nation. But that would have happened only to someone lacking Tomatsu’s compassionate and aesthetic sensibility. Essays such as “Chewing Gum and Chocolate,” “I Am a King” and “11:02 Nagasaki” serve as metaphors for the emotions and experiences of a changing Japan, visual poems impressed with haunting images born of those events.
The first chapter of his retrospective, with the title “Aprés-Guerre,” examines what the Japanese call yakinohara, or burnt plains. The effects of war are only implied in several of these images, such as the bittersweet shot of schoolchildren at lunch, suggesting orphans of the war.
The need to start anew after a giant wave of finality comes across in Tomatsu’s strong focus on the theme of work. In “A Girl,” an unposed young girl stands in a hallway diligently focused on her needlepoint. “Prostitute” shows an unapologetic, painted woman vehemently blowing smoke through her nostrils during a rest between clients. “Homeworkers” emphasizes the shadows of two women’s figures bent over their beadwork on a straw mat. By eliminating the background, each of these shots takes its subjects out of their immediate surroundings and places them in the greater perspective of the nation’s need to carry on amid the devastation.
Work, however, is just one of many leitmotifs in Tomatsu’s larger idea that nothing is unimportant. He eliminates extraneous material and shoots his subject with nonjudgmental compassion — whether it is an abandoned high-heeled shoe, or a decaying living-room wall — allowing the beauty and frailty of each to shine forth. Even when shooting a sex worker shouting out in ecstasy below her unseen partner for the essay “Eros, Tokyo,” Tomatsu almost seems to have been shooting from another room on a timer — he is that careful to not impose himself upon the subject.
The artist’s compassion shows itself to be unbiased, especially in his essay “The Americans,” which Tomatsu shot over a period of 15 years while touring U.S. military installations. Succinctly summing up the tensions between the two nationalities by declaring that “Love and hate are no more distant than two sides of a sheet of paper,” he places all his subjects in front of the same lens, creating small poems about shattered survivors of a devastating war.
Shomei Tomatsu

at Galerie Rudolfinum Ends April 15. Alšovo nábř. 12, Prague 1–Old Town. Open Tues.–Sun. 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

Shots of two military children smiling from within a car, an American couple walking through army barracks, even a group of Marines towering above the photographer with the bottom of one of their boots poised over the lens — they all portray the fragility and humanity of the people. Tomatsu focuses on details of facial expression and often shoots up close, providing a sense of intimacy, forcing us to know the Americans just as the Japanese people had to.
Perhaps the most moving essay in the retrospective is “A-Bomb,” a project commissioned by the Japanese Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs to shoot the hibakusha, the survivors of the Nagasaki bombings.
Collected in his book 11:02 Nagasaki, these photographs beg the most compassion from the viewer for obvious reasons. And perhaps for those very reasons, Tomatsu refuses to inject his scenes with any staged tragedy. Rather, he lets his subjects speak for themselves, such as the second-generation hibakusha girl who looks at the camera lens with only one eye. Again, Tomatsu creates a metaphor, this time between the lost innocence of a little girl and the lost innocence of a world now aware of the scale of destruction of which it is capable.
As Tomatsu matured and began experimenting with more surrealistic forms of photography — adding paint splatter, overexposing sections of film — he let go of his obsession with U.S.-Japanese tension, turning his focus on the essence of his own country.
Writing in 1999 that he had “embarked on a nameless sea of chaos that is neither Japan nor America,” Tomatsu, the artist and the man, had come full circle, almost completely healed of the wounds that first inspired his art.

Bethany Shaffer can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (31/01/2007):

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